Public Enemies_ America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI - Bryan Burrough [46]
Miraculously, Clyde seemed to have chosen an escape route unblocked by possemen. Down in the riverside thicket, no one was shooting at them. Heading for the paved road with thoughts of stealing a car, they thrashed west along the river for several minutes until they came to a rise. Buck collapsed. “Take Blanche,” he whispered to Clyde. “I can’t make it.” Clyde peered down the river. In the distance he could just make out a bridge. “I’m going after a car,” he said. “Hide here. They’ll never find you in these thickets.”7
As the others crawled beneath some bushes, Clyde climbed the little hill and trotted through the trees toward the bridge. As he emerged from the woods, he saw two deputies standing on the road beside it, one of them leaning against the concrete archway that marked the entrance to the old amusement park. The deputies saw Clyde first, raised their guns, and fired. Clyde ducked behind a tree.
“Hey, don’t shoot!” he hollered. “I’m a state man!”8
When the deputies lowered their guns, Clyde stepped out and fired. The deputies fired back, one of their bullets knocking the Browning from his hands. Clyde grabbed a pistol from his waistband and retreated into the thicket. A minute later he reached the others. “You okay?” he asked Bonnie. She nodded, hugging him.
“They’ve got the bridge blocked,” Clyde said to W.D. “Can you help Bonnie cross the river? We’ll have to swim for it.” Abandoning Buck and Blanche to their fates, the trio slid into the shallow river and swam the twenty yards across, Bonnie holding on to W.D.’s neck. On the far side, Clyde looked up through the trees and saw a farmhouse. Leaving Bonnie and W.D. sitting by the river, he made for it.
The first indication of trouble eighteen-year-old Marvelle Feller had as he walked out to feed his father’s cattle was his German shepherd, who began growling and baring its teeth. Suddenly the dog raced toward the Feller family’s cornfield. A moment later Feller saw a man emerge from the corn-stalks, his tattered shirt streaked with mud and blood. Standing behind a barbed-wire fence, Clyde brandished his pistol.
“Call that dog off,” he yelled, “or I’ll kill him.”
Feller ran to the dog and grabbed its collar. Feller’s father and a hired hand came out to see what the commotion was about. “Y’all get down here!” Clyde yelled, pointing the pistol. They obliged.
Clyde placed his fingers to his lips and let out a loud wolf-whistle. Moments later W.D. and Bonnie appeared behind him. W.D., wiping blood from his eyes, was bleeding from several flesh wounds. The front of Bonnie’s nightgown was red with blood.
“Help me get her over the fence,” Clyde ordered the elder Feller, who stepped forward and lifted Bonnie over the barbed wire.
Just then Mrs. Feller and her daughter ran out of the farmhouse. “They’ve got a bunch of outlaws cornered in the park,” she started to say, and then she lost the words. “We ain’t gonna hurt you folks,” Clyde said. “We just need a car.”
The Fellers had three cars; unfortunately, two sat up on blocks. Clyde waved his gun at a Plymouth in the garage. “Okay,” he said. “Back it out.” The Fellers placed Bonnie in the backseat. Marvelle had to show Clyde how to start the car. With the teenager’s help, Clyde drove to the road outside and headed north, away from Dexfield Park.
An hour later the possemen combing the woods around Dexfield Park found Buck and Blanche in the thicket and took them into custody. Buck was taken to King’s Daughters